Yang Lai
OneXinli, a platform providing psychological counseling services, announced that it has raised dozens of millions of USD in a Series A funding round. SAIF Partners (Softbank Asia Infrastructure Fund) was the leading investor, with Northern Light Venture Capital following suit, NetEase News reported on Tuesday.
OneXinLi was founded in Guangzhou in June 2011. In the past four years, the company took advantage of online new media, publishing magazines and placing its psychology podcasts on major Chinese radio platforms. In 2014, they started to develop mobile counseling products and help companies with their EAPs (employee assistance programs). The platform has connected over 12 million users with 6372 psychologists and over 600 psychological columnists, working with 792 psychological agencies.
But it is a challenging industry. Huang Weiqiang, the platform’s founder, says the company isn’t counting on booking counseling sessions for their main business, because counseling tends to be unpopular with Chinese people. Rather, Chinese customers are more receptive to using the online Q&A model to sort out their psychological issues.
This is the platform that introduces online Q&A as a new function on their app, which is undergoing testing. The platform charges 5-10 RMB for customers to get a question answered professionally. In the future, the platform may introduce a membership plan to provide private counseling services when the market is more mature.
The mobile health market is expected to see a boom in China. It was reported last year that among the 30 million Chinese who suffer from depression, only 10% were accepting treatment.
Jin Fengchun, a SAIF partner, said OneXinli has been developing steadily in the past few years, and it has good resources and a good service ecosystem. Its user numbers and growth rate are huge. It has huge potential to become the leading psychological app in China.